Funded Projects Gallery
Overview of the Pathways to Sustainability funded and co-funded projects. The Seed grants (up to 10.000 euro) aim to stimulate inter- and trans-disciplinary interactions and create impact. The Incubator Grants (8,000 euro) aim to invest in community building, offering inter- and trans-disciplinary teams of UU scholars the opportunity to collaborate on innovative ideas. More information about the funding opportunities can be found here.
Seed Funded Projects
Skills for Sustainability
Seed awarded project ‘Skills for Sustainability’ aims to develop and provide an innovative set of skills training for UU students with a unique focus on the characteristics of sustainability issues.
Social Impact Consulting Challenge
This Seed awarded project aims to develop, The Social Impact Consulting Challenge, which is offered to students of the Master Programs, Business & Social Impact and Sustainable Finance and Investments, and provides novel learning opportunities for students to support real-life companies in solving sustainability related problems.
Bridging for Social Impact and Sustainability
This Seed funded project is interwoven around the Master’s programme ‘Organising Social Impact’ (OSI) and aims to make connections to a range of societal actors, bringing together students, academics, community organisers and various organisations through a range of events and guest lectures.
Educational Worldview Journey
This Seed funded project aims to fully develop and pilot a learning experience called the Educational Worldview Journey by using the Worldview perspectives as a basis and through different types of learning methods.
Artist in Residence
This Seed awarded project investigates if a collaboration between academics and artists can yield new perspectives on climate politics. UU and the Jan van Eyck Academy of Fine Arts (Maastricht) enter into a collaboration to understand how low-carbon futures are currently imagined and how this could be done differently.
The Future Generation and the Future
This Seed awarded project aims to consider sustainable futures and do so in a way that connects social science knowledge and natural science knowledge and connects to stakeholders and societal developments by giving voice to the future generation and simultaneously contributing to the practice of ‘futures literacy’ in high schools.
Utrecht Centre for Environmental Humanities
This Seed awarded project aims to enable the further development of the Utrecht Centre for Environmental Humanities (UCEH). This Centre serves as an important centre of expertise in the field of Sustainability research, covering all Humanities disciplines that Utrecht University has on offer.
Saving the climate and being happy – Can we have it all?
This Seed awarded project aims to, in collaboration with the information agency Milieu Centraal, which provides consumers with advice about sustainability, examine if the positive framing of climate communication plays a role in the relation between sustainable behaviour and well-being in the Dutch population.
Improving the Integration of Legal Knowledge and Scholars in Climate Scenario Assessments
This Seed funded project, led by Dr. Haomiao Du, aims to investigate the necessity and feasibility of integrating legal knowledge and scholars into climate scenario assessments.
Photo credit: Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving
Strategic Public Private Partnership (PPP) Health Holland (HH): Healthy Living Environment
This Seed funded project aims to form a consortium for a strategic Public Private Partnership (PP) and to contribute to the development of the hardware, software and orgware needed to (re)develop homes and living environments that stimulate health.
By the name of social captial: building local initiatives for community conservation areas in the remote and impoverished archipelago in Indonesia.
This Seed funded project is an intervention that aims to further assist the capacity development
of the local communities, and ultimately, local and national governments of the Banggai archipelago.
The Alt Protein Project at Utrecht
The Seed funded project, The Alt Protein Project at Utrecht, aims to enable a sustainable, just and animal-free food supply by creating an impactful research and development hub on Alt (alternative) Proteins in Utrecht.
Sharing is not always caring: paradoxes in the sharing economy
This Seed funded project aims to initiate a research project between the Copernicus Institute and Utrecht School of Economics exploring the paradoxes of the sharing economy to foster its positive sustainability impact.
Mapping the public’s perceptions of the biodiversity crisis and pathways to bend the curve.
This Seed funded project will offer insights to researchers and teachers on the underexplored perceptual aspect of the biodiversity crisis, offering insights to societal partners on how to deal with the perceptions of the public.
IDEA-H2: Innovative Detection and Environmental Assessment of Hydrogen Leakage in Natural Gas Pipelines.
This Seed funded project will focus on identifying technical challenges, including material brittleness, that could pose a risk to pipeline integrity, and developing strategies to detect hydrogen leaks and minimize environmental impacts.
The Utrecht region as a living lab for global transitions.
This Seed funded project aims to evaluate the transformative potential of experiments with healthy urban living innovations in the Utrecht region and to support the scaling of these innovations using innovative action-oriented research.
European Network of Environmental Humanities
This Seed funded project aims to organise a 2-day interdisciplinary workshop and networking event in autumn 2023, where representatives from major Centers for Environmental Humanities in Europe will be invited to share their expertise and insights.
The public communication of climate science in the platform era.
This Seed funded project seeks to create a set of resources to support innovative inter-faculty collaborations around a central theme: public communication about climate science in today’s increasingly platform-oriented media landscape.
Revisiting Climate-Culture
This Seed funded project promotes the internationalization of various Pathways to Sustainability themes by creating a vibrant community on ‘climate culture’ both within the university and beyond by engaging both national and international societal stakeholders.
Public talks: Are sustainable futures possible?
This Seed funded project aims to organise and facilitate public talks and lectures, which will provide insights into the latest scientific developments within the field of sustainability, globalization, and energy in an accessible way, by offering lectures from two world-renowned experts.
The Use of Satellite Imagery in Visualizing and Monitoring Ecological Violence in the Russia-Ukraine War
This Seed funded project brings together students and scholars from various backgrounds and career stages, in order to encourage sustainable thinking and practice in the context of monitoring and documenting environmental harms.
Solar photovoltaics integration for restoring arid land (SPIRAL)
This Seed funded project aims to fill the gap of the lack of investments, in the implementation of large PV systems with multiple co-benefits, leading to an enhanced understanding of PV technologies, the development of appropriate legislation, improved informed decision-making, and advanced solar PV technical designs, leading to improved ecological and biodiversity benefits.
Incubator Funded Projects
Naturicity: Everyday narratives of urban futures
This Incubator awarded project aims to contribute to new imaginaries of cities, where nature is viewed as an integral part of environmental, social resilience and social justice, with changing perceptions driving its uptake through culture, markets and policies.
Whose Ocean?
This Incubator funded project aims to answer the question, “whose ocean is it?'' and by unpacking this overall question, finding answers to questions such as, what interests should be represented in ocean governance?
Women, health and water – striving for environmental justice in the agribusiness sector
This Incubator funded project aims to develop diverse perspectives and strong system thinking in order to develop “new imaginative ideas of sustainable futures” for agribusiness and beyond, with a focus on women, in particular.
People's Energy
This Incubator funded project aims to investigate the drivers and barriers to the realisation of ECs that enable a sustainable and fair energy transition.
Rethinking Hydrogen
This Incubator funded project aims to research and develop an holistic view on energy efficient offshore hydrogen production, within environmental boundaries.
Resourcefulness
This Incubator funded project aims to to map and visualize the changing global flows of resources and finance that are generated by the energy transition.
Photography by Tom Hegen.
Future-proof Proteins: Bridging sustainability, health and equity in the protein transition.
This Incubator funded project aims to promote an open, interdisciplinary exchange on the protein transition, by unravelling the factors which have the biggest potential to hamper the speed of the protein transition.
Conceptualising Ecocide
This Incubator funded project aims to formulate a working definition of the concept of “ecocide” based on discussion within the interdisciplinary team and with expert stakeholders and to set up an ecocide mock trial with students and experts across disciplines.
Plastics on your Plate
This Incubator funded project aims to build an improved understanding of contamination pathways and health impacts of plastics and plastic exposure in humans and farm animals, and explore how diets and food type may affect the exposure to plastics.
Sustainable Peatlands NL
This Incubator funded project aims to accelerate the transition of the Dutch coastal peatlands towards a sustainable future by developing concrete action perspectives and pathways to enhancing the sustainability of peatlands.
Sustainable Finance
This Incubator funded project aims to develop the knowledge and tools necessary to help pension funds integrate biodiversity considerations into their investment decisions.
Compounding Hydroclimatic Extremes
This Incubator funded project aims to develop a method to capture hydroclimatic compound events in terms of frequency, duration, intensity and spatial extent, and move beyond the current assessment of isolated climate impacts.
Other (Co-)Funded Projects
Boosting Biodiversity Community
This community project aims to strengthen biodiversity globally and locally. This ambition is part of the Utrecht University Strategic Plan. Follow the link to find out how the community aims to make this happen and why is it deemed necessary.